


in the hands of men and ghosts

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [27]
Category: Meddling Kids - Edgar Cantero
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Body Horror, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Masturbation, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 19:55:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21884296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: In which Nate just wants to jerk off in peace without his hallucination of his dead best friend trying to cockblock him from beyond the grave, Peter just wants to stop being called an hallucination, and the only guy who gets to come in the end isn’t the one who’s still alive.
Relationships: Nate Rogers/Peter Manner
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 26
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	in the hands of men and ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> 027/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #80 – ghosts.

An hour past his mandatory bedtime, Nate’s still no closer to falling asleep than he was when he first crawled into his cramped little bed and wrapped his scratchy, dingy sheets around himself like a thousand other mental patients have before.

Maybe even with these exact same sheets, come to think about it. They’d certainly seen better days, as dull as they look with that off-white color that always speaks of repeated bleachings that kept on going even after the grey had set into the meat of the threads and stated with all the firmness of a poltergeist living in your attic that it had no plans of ever getting out. 

Not that Nate has any business judging. He’s seen better days himself and none of his bad days have kept him from wrapping these sheets around his body every night. They’ve kept him warm, kept him covered, kept his body tucked in from shoulders to feet, and given him some sense of having a bed to call his own even though he’s only really renting this one and can never fall asleep easily in it.

He’s hyper aware of everything, is the problem. Of the scratch of those sheets, of the dark, of how hard the mattress is at his back, of the rise of his stomach every time he breathes and the hand he has resting low there that goes up and down with each inhale in and exhale out.

He’s aware of his own hand on his body the way you’d be aware of a spider sitting on the rim of your bath tub while you’re buried chin-deep under gallons of hot water and strawberry scented bubbles, the way you’re aware of your legs pressed together under your desk during an exam all full of barely tamped down impulse to bounce them up and down, to get up and run, an impulse controlled only by your teacher’s narrowed eyes zeroed in on you with the dare to _just try it you little snot just try to breathe try to even move before I tell you to and I’ll fail you_ _r ass_ _faster than_ _your parents failed to rubber up and stop a fool like you from being born in the first place_ as obvious as if it were tattooed on her matronly face.

Nate taps his fingers on his belly now just so he has something to do, because there’s no one there to snap at him to _be still goddamnit Nate so annoying_ , and the anxious rhythm causes the lightest stirring of sensation starting at his bellybutton. That sensation tingles further down, pulls at something in his groin like his dick is caught on a string, and he thinks about it for half a second before he determines he’s not going to sleep any time ever anyway, says fuck it, and slips the hand beneath the band of his standard issue asylum pants, past the coarse hairs between his legs and down to wrap around the prize they lead to.

Nate’s not horny, really, he’s not even close to hard, but he is bored as all hell and that’s as much of a justification for jerking off as any.

Shame he only gets one pump of his soft cock in before he’s interrupted.

“ _Yikes_ , man! Choking it with me right here in the room?” Peter’s voice rings out from a few feet away, a genuine note of alarm in the tone mixed in with the teasing. “Have a little respect for your roomie, Nate!”

Nate’s too used to Peter’s impeccable timing by now to be startled, to scream, to rip his hands out of his pants and pull his old grey sheets up to his chin in alarm like some kind of nuthouse virgin concerned about her modesty.

No, all Nate feels by now is exasperation and all he greets Peter with is a refrain he’s repeated what feels like a thousand times before, more dryly every time.

“You’re not my roommate, Peter,” Nate says, dry as the Sahara. Dry as oyster crackers crushed up on top of a bowl of sawdust soup. “You’re a figment of my imagination and I only have as much respect for you as I do for the medication I take to shut you up which clearly isn’t working as well as it should be.”

Nate’s hand is still on his cock as he speaks and, like the dark and his own sleeplessness in it, he is hyper aware of this fact. He still refuses to take his hand off of it out of pure stubbornness and a not small amount of spite all the same.

Real people deserve the respect of not having mental patients holding their dicks like a kid holds a teddy bear for comfort in front of them, hallucinations do not, and on the list of things Nate refuses to do (right after taking his hand out of his pants, of course), following the yellow brick road of insanity that starts with respecting his hallucination’s boundaries and leads to him believing Peter is really Peter after all is sitting solid at number two.

“Huh,” is all Peter says at first. More of a sound than a word but loaded with meaning. _Huh_ as in _that’s interesting, Nateyboy, very interesting indeed_ or maybe _huh_ as in _oh so we’re back on that bullshit again, I see._

For the record: Nate is not back on any bullshit.

Nate has firmly been on the _you’re not real Peter you’re dead Peter why out of all three of us_ _still alive_ _are you haunting me and not your old girlfriend or even our old girl friend you only mostly pretended to like in life and would definitely enjoy fucking with post-death Peter_ train since the jump.

Nate has his own cabin on that train in first class reserved just for him, he is the sole reason the train conductors get up in the morning, and all the whatever-the-train-equivalent-of-flight-attendants-are all know Nate by name and bring him his favorite drinks and snacks to his cabin on a rolling cart at regular intervals without even having to be asked. Nate has never departed from that cabin since the first time he walked through its door. In fact, he has lived in it for so long now that they’re charging him for both rent and utilities. There are pink slips shoved under his pillow every morning with mismatched letters cut and pasted out from magazines across them that say _pay or die_ like something you’d get if the Tooth Fairy got too impatient for junior to knock a tooth loose on his own and decided to start threatening him into popping out a wisdom about twenty years earlier than the usual instead.

Members of the jury, please let it be said with full vehemence that _Nate_ is not the one in this mental patient/hallucination relationship who has been wishy-washy about where he stands on anything, thank you very much.

T he bed by Nate’s feet  dip s  under Peter’s  weight  without Peter even having to walk across the room  to get there. It’s  like he just teleported,  one second against the wall and then with a  _flicker-flack_ we’re at  _where is he now folks?! Where will our ghostly apparition magically appear next?!_

Travel for hallucinations is so simple, Nate thinks. Why walk when you can blip in and out like a TV changing channels? And then he follows that thought up with  this one :  the bed is dipping under Peter’s weight. Nate can feel the dip, feel the way his own body shifted minutely when Peter appeared, and it’s funny because h allucinations really shouldn’t  _have_ weight. Ghosts, even though that’s not what Peter is (what Nate refuses to believe Peter is), shouldn’t have weight either.  If teleportation defies the laws of physics, then so does that.

And  _yet_ .

Sitting a cross from him now, Nate has no choice but to look at  Peter’s perfect Hollywood wonderboy face and the crooked smirk  on it that stands out like a scar . 

“You imagine me when you jerk off?” Peter perfects the right blend of affronted and flattered, but Nate doesn’t take the flattered part personally. Nate thinks Peter would be flattered if The Blob told him it jerked off to thoughts of him, if Godzilla did, if any horrible thing from the pages of Creepy walked out of the comic book world and told him the same. 

Peter would smile winningly and say _of course you do, sir, who wouldn’t?_ and then he’d offer the monster an autograph in exchange for not eating him. _But I’ll only sign above the belt, pal!_ he would add with a wink. _Don’t forget that!_ _Peter Manner only_ _slips his John Hancock_ _in_ _to_ _naughty places for the ladies – men and monsters need not apply!_ _Say, you wouldn’t happen to know Vampirella, would you?_

“You know,” and now Peter’s voice is lilting, teasing, like the voice of someone about to share a secret at a dinner table about one of their dining companions that they know will be the conversational equivalent of throwing a grenade on a pile of dynamite for no other reason than to sit back and watch everyone at the table explode. “I always thought you were gay.”

B ut if Peter’s expecting an explosion, he doesn’t get one.

N ate does not explode.

Nate rolls his eyes and wonders  not for the first time  what it says about him that these are the kinds of hallucinations he has other than the obvious insanity  factor,  before resolutely  doubling down on his decision that he’s not going to lean so far into  that insanity as to let a dead  guy cockblock him  when jerking off is the only entertainment in this place other than talking to the other crazies  (which, to be fair, Nate quite likes doing most of the time, but a conversation is still no match for an orgasm even with the best conversational partners the hospital has to offer) .

Knowing Peter, if Nate lets it happen now then it’ll happen every time he even thinks about putting his hand down his pants and if Nate has to go weeks, months,  _years_ without getting to come he thinks he’ll go well and truly nuts.  And n ot  _post-traumatic_ _anxiety and depression and dead friend hallucinations_ nuts, but  _Susie Warwick down the hall who eats mud visitors have tracked in off the floor with nothing but her tongue and got caught hoarding the_ _mini_ _cartons of milk they’re served with meals under her bed because she thinks they’re kittens she adopted_ _from the pound_ nuts.

“You’re not here,” Nate repeats, shutting his eyes and starting to move his hand again, soft cock filling out easily as he fucks slowly into his own grip. “You’re not real and I don’t have to take shit from you.”

“No objection to what I said at all? No denials?” Peter snarks, but Nate ignores him. 

He focuses on the feel of his cock in his palm, his fingers squeezing harder around the head, the wet sound of his movements in the air, the sound of a zipper being pulled down, and –

Nate’s hand stills again and his eyes fly open in time to see Peter pulling his own cock out of his pants where he sits at the end of the bed, leaning back against one of the tall posts with his legs spread out and bracketing Nate’s own legs even though Nate never felt him move into that position, as though this is _his_ bed and he has every right to be pulling his cock off in it.

Somehow, Nate is surprised. Genuinely, truly surprised.

He’d honestly thought he was above feeling surprised about anything relating to Peter anymore.

That first time he’d popped a boner over Peter? Nate was shocked. Hearing that Peter died and very probably got that way on purpose? There was a decent amount of surprise at that. And when not long afterwards Nate first started seeing his supposedly dead childhood friend walking around and hearing him talking like a real, living person? Surprise of a goddamn lifetime.

But after a certain amount of time, Nate had gotten used to even his hallucination of his dead best friend being his frequent (and often unwelcome) companion, and he’d thought – _okay fine this is as weird as it gets_ _Peter Manner has ceased to be a source of unexpected feelings in my life I may be bedbugfucking nuts but_ _nothing can catch me off guard anymore_ _and there’s that!_

Except that Peter’s cock has caught Nate pretty damn off guard.

And still,  Nate can’t help but look down at that cock.  He  can’t help but notice that it’s a good bit bigger than his,  can’t help but notice that Peter isn’t circumcised like he is,  can’t help but notice  how his  own  cock gives a throb so strong at  _that_ little observation that his hand tightens around it without him consciously deciding to do it  which doesn’t exactly do anything to  alleviate him of his little  _suddenly hard as fucking nails_ problem one bit.

Nate blames his surprise  on all of that , because seriously? Fuck his brain.

He drags his eyes back up to Peter’s face,  takes in the knowing look on it, and tells himself he’s not an eleven year old anymore and the heat on  his cheeks is definitely not a blush.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks Peter, scandalized – a word he’s positive he’s never used to describe his reaction to anything before in his life. Little old ladies get scandalized at seeing girls wearing miniskirts without panties in public and young people of any gender saying words like _fuck_ _pussyshit_ in casual conversation. Nate Rogers does not get scandalized because of his dead friend’s penis. That just isn’t the way the world _works_.

Peter flashes a look of mock surprise, a  _who, me?_ expression. “Oh, I’m sorry,  am I just supposed to sit back and watch you have all the fun? That’s selfish of you, man. It’s been a while for me, too.”

There are so many things Nate could say to that, really, but what he settles on is  repeating the one thing that matters in this moment because it couldn’t be possibl y be stated enough, “What the  _fuck,_ Peter ?

Peter rolls his eyes like  _Nate_ is being the frustrating one and promptly starts jerking his cock off, his pace sensual and languid,  like there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this at all. Just a guy in a mental hospital with his dead friend across from him, both with their dicks out. No, nothing odd there. Just another day in crazyland.

Nate tells himself not to look  at Peter’s cock again , not to make this weirder than it already is, if that’s even possible.

And then Nate looks again and, yeah, making this more  weird ?  _Alarmingly_ possible.  One hundred percent guaranteed with a boner attached. 

“You think I’m an hallucination? Fine, man, keep believing that,” Peter says, a groan spilling out of his parted lips as he keeps fucking his fist, starting to use his other hand to fondle his balls. “But _I_ say I’m a real boy and real boys have needs. Feel free to take care of yours. Wouldn’t want you to get too pent up, Nate. It might make you _crazy_.”

Nate wants to say something to that, something witty and sarcastic, but his mouth goes dry and his words dry up with it as he watches Peter, watches his thick uncut cock fucking in and out of the tight circle of his fist, a bead of white fluid leaking out of the dark head. He watches the rough way Peter handles his sack, the glide of his fingers and where he puts them and how much pressure he uses when he puts them there.

“Oh, atta boy, Nate,” Peter says, lust and laughter both thick in his voice, and Nate doesn’t even realize he’s started resuming the motions of his own fist until he says it, his cock pulsing with need and his hand automatically mimicking the same pace Peter is using. 

H e thinks about stopping again, about pulling his hand off and getting up and going...somewhere. To the bathroom, maybe, to finish up alone unless Peter gets up  or teleports  and follows him in  there, too, and hell, Peter is enough of a bastard to do it.

He should stop,  really,  he  _should_ but then  a little voice in  Nate’ s head pipes up and asks him  – why?  Why the hell should he?

Peter’s an hallucination, he isn’t real, he’s just a figment of Nate’s mind. That’s what Nate has been saying all along, isn’t it? And this? This is better than Nate’s felt in months, in years honestly. He can’t remember the last time his cock was so hard or the build up to an orgasm so addicting, but he thinks it probably hasn’t happened since he and the real Peter – the living one – were still kids and Nate had discovered what his cock could do for the first time and how thinking about Peter made it feel.

_I always thought you were gay_ , this Peter said, and Nate thinks there’s no stronger proof that he _is_ an hallucination than that. The real Peter had never known, had never had an inkling. He’d been too oblivious, too self-absorbed, too caught up in their mysteries, and too caught up in _girls_ to notice that the boy who followed after him like a lost puppy looked at him with something more than just a kid’s admiration of a charismatic older friend. 

None of that had ever stopped Nate’s pervasive fear that Peter would somehow find out or one day just inexplicably _know_ , of course, but still. 

If  the real Peter had  walked in on Nate jerking off , Nate  knows without a  shadow of a  doubt that his response sure as hell wouldn’t have been to pull his  own  cock  out  and show it to Nate.  And i f  the real  Peter had known that Nate’s wet dreams  from fifth grade on  had him in the starring role long before he became an actor, he would’ve no homo’d Nate so hard that he would’ve made like a ghost back then and never let himself be  alone with Nate  ever  again.

W hat was it the real living Peter had said to him once? Oh, right:  _I don’t mind queers, I just wouldn’t want to be next to one alone in a bathroom y’know what I mean, Nate?_ and Nate, who had been standing next to Peter in the bathroom not even a full hour earlier, had laughed self-consciously and said  _sure man of course_ and hated himself for saying it and hated Peter so much more for putting him in the position where he had to say it and then hated himself again the  _most_ when even that and a hundred comments like it said to Nate over the years like he was in on it, like he agreed  with it (like of course he agreed, why wouldn’t he agree, wouldn’t want to disagree and have people think you’re a homo, right, Nate? wouldn’t want  _Peter_ to think you’re a homo and you’re gay for him like you totally are,  _right, Nate_ ?) never made Nate stop looking at Peter like the sun shined out of his asshole  and did nothing to kill his first  (and only)  boyhood crush.

The real Peter had never stooped so low as to gaybash anyone or to say anything unsavory to the faces of the few out and proud people they’d known growing up but t he real Peter had  also  not been the kind of guy who flirted with other men, who showed other men his cock, or wh o would in any scenario short of one that required using mutual masturbation as a life saving maneuver (and maybe not even  _then_ ) offer to jerk off in the same bed with another man, especially one he obviously knows has a thing for him. 

The real Peter was painfully straight (no more painfully to anyone than a young Nate who would’ve taken the slightest chance that Peter wasn’t straight and beat en his cock raw just at the possibilities of it if such a chance had ever existed) and  while  Peter had a warm sort of masculinity that Nate had found moth-to-flame attractive as a kid, in hindsight it was the horribly fragile kind of masculine. The kind of masculine where someone calling Peter a pansy would’ve been  enough of a  blow  to hit  him with a ll the force of a  steel bat being taken into a fine China shop by a bull with an ax to grind  against the shop proprietors  would  be hitting shelf after shelf of saucers and teacups  until the cops showed up to drag it back to the zoo .

This hallucination isn’t the real Peter, then. It can’t be. It’s nothing less than what Nate has been telling himself since these hallucinations first started happening but some part of him must have still wondered – still doubted – because he can feel the relief that the thought brings him as clearly as he can feel his hand on his cock. He can feel his doubt sliding away like drops of condensation down a cold glass of water and down with it, Nate can feel his inhibitions going too.

B ecause, see, if Peter is an hallucination then this isn’t really all that different from any other fantasy Nate has ever had about him, is it? It’s just that this fantasy isn’t just in Nate’s imagination, it’s outside of it in 3D, technicolor, full sound and sensation included.

And Nate’s dealt with enough shit both because of his feelings about the real Peter and his hallucinations of the dead one that no one can blame him for wanting to use his fantasy for what fantasies are for,  least of all himself.

H is hand slows on his cock, slows its pace to something less rushing to the finish line even though he feels a gentle breeze  could push him there by now anyway,  slows it down until it stops  entirely  and he’s just holding his cock hard and aching and painfully still in his hand. 

H is gaze narrows in on Peter, on Peter’s face, on his tilted back head on the bed post and the hot flush high on his cheeks and his closed but fluttering eyelids and his mouth that’s all half-parted pretty lips with short little hitched breaths slipping out from between them, and it’s  all beautiful but it’s  the mouth Nate settles on. 

It was always the mouth he settled on as a kid, too, always the thing about Peter that drew Nate’s attention whether  Peter was talking and Nate was listening hung  up  on every word or whether he was talking and Nate was fighting not to blush over the ideas his mind whispered devil-in-his-ear seductive-like to him about how to shut Peter up  that Nate knew he was too chickenshit to  ever  follow through on

Some things never change,  but – then again – some things do.

“Peter,” Nate chokes his name out in barely more than a rasp, a whisper, before he even has a fully-formed idea in his head _now_ over what it is he wants to come from it, but it’s too late to second guess and hope Peter hadn’t heard because Peter’s eyes are fluttering open like a coma patient coming out of hibernation and there’s no backing out now.

The second  Peter looks at Nate, it’s like he can read Nate’s mind (or like he shares it).  His eyes are dark with arousal and sparkling with mischief.  His parted lips close and waste no time tipping up on one side in the birth of a new teasing smirk and even though his mouth is closed, even though he’s not saying a goddamn thing yet, Nate still hears that nudging voice from his childhood telling him to  _shut him up_ anyway and exactly how to do it.

“Peter,” he tries it again, more firmly this time, more confident. “Peter, suck my cock.”

And  N ate,  dumbfuck that he is, actually thinks he’ll do it.

He thinks with his newfound certainty, Peter’ll have to do it because Peter is just Nate’s fantasy and that means Nate is in control and the reason Peter has never listened to Nate before now  must be because Nate still doubted, he still thought somewhere maybe not that deep down  _but what if it’s really Peter, you know the power in the Necronomicon was real well maybe ghosts are too_

But Nate’s doubts are gone now. They’re gone! He should be able to say _suck my cock_ and Peter like a genie will immediately follow the command of the person whose brain is projecting him, unwillingly letting him free of his bottle. He’ll crawl towards Nate with that smirking mouth and then he’ll pull the sheet down off of Nate’s lap and bend his head down and wrap his lips around Nate’s cock, his eyes glittering up at Nate watching him the whole time, until Nate comes right on his tongue and Peter will swallow every drop and then he’ll open his mouth to show Nate the _throat-deep-white-streaked_ insides of it and Nate will be so turned on, he’ll push Peter’s head down and have him do it all over again.

That’s how this should go, Nate is sure of it.

But  Peter does n’t suck Nate’s cock.

Peter doesn’t do anything Nate thought he would.

What  Peter  does is laugh louder than he ever did when he was alive. A loud,  shocked,  ripped-out guffaw that cuts off into a choking breath half-way through, and  then  Peter’s eyes are snapping shut again and his whole body is seizing up and arching as he comes, white ropes shooting out from his cock and all over the sheets of Nate’s bed, the sheets that still cover Nate’s  _body_ . 

Peter is stopped from coming right on Nate’ s skin by just a few thin layers of fabric and the thought has Nate letting out a sound that he’d call a whimper if it came from a dog but refuses to put a name to when it’s coming from hi mself.

“Ohh fuck, fuckfuckfuck,” Peter is gasping it, _laughing_ it through his open mouth (a mouth grinning so broad, teeth bared, it looks like it _hurts_ ) even as the last of his come spills out of him and his body relaxes back down and goes boneless, his head tilting back on the bed post, his hair looking sweat-soaked and askew. He’s laughing so much his whole body shakes, his dick still in his hand the whole while, and the bed and Nate shake along with it.

When Peter’s eyes open again, he looks at Nate with so much joyful mirth, his face red from coming and laughing, that it’s the most alive he’s ever looked since Nate has started seeing him. 

Nate can’t help it – can’t help it at all – when his breath gets caught a little at  the look of him,  when  seeing Peter like this makes him feel like someone’s broken a coke bottle against his head and then stuck the jagged-sharp-glassy side of it right into his chest  and then ripped it cruelly down, leaving broken bottle pieces embedded deep in the skin.

“Oh, Nate,” Peter sighs like he’s breathless, his laughter dying down and his grin simmering into something still amused but smaller and easier on the muscles in his cheeks. “Nate, Nate, Nate. How often did you think of saying _that_ to me when we were kids?”

And then the sudden heart-stabbing-heart-wrenching-heart-obliterating thing going on in Nate’s chest gets shoved in a box and thrown out in the cold and all Nate feels is a horrible flush of embarrassment the likes of which he hasn’t felt since they _were_ kids instead. 

Suddenly having his hand on his cock in front of Peter doesn’t seem deserving of the blasé reaction he was giving it.

Suddenly it feels like the worst possible thing in the world, bad to him now like the thought of actually telling Peter how he felt about him then was.

Nate releases his grip on his cock and slowly, cautiously slides his hand out of his pants to rest on his stomach like it was before he decided to slip it under his waistband in the first place. Peter is too busy watching his face with all the rapt attention of a cat watching a terrified mouse that’s caught and struggling between its paws to notice and Nate hates himself for being relieved, then asks himself where the hell his sure attitude from just minutes before has run off to.

He feels horribly like he’s eleven again and  it’s summer at the pool and he’s  hiding in the bathroom with Peter on the other side of the door asking if he’s sick because he ran off so fast  and  _you looked a little red buddy d’you think you might have sunstroke_ , but he wasn’t sick at all. No, he’d just seen Peter soaking wet in his swim shorts and gotten hard for the first time in his life at the sight of  him  and felt so embarrassed about his cock tenting his own shorts and so terrified at the thought of Peter seeing and knowing at a glance what caused the reaction that running away to hide where no one could see him  at all seemed the only option  he had .

The difference is that now Nate isn’t eleven, Peter is dead, and there’s no way Nate can hide from him –  no rooms he can simply  go in and  close the door on,  nowhere he can go that this Peter can’t follow.

“Well, Nate?” Peter presses almost gleefully, like a thumb digging into a bruise. “Got a number for me? If it was so many times you can’t remember, go ahead and make a guess.  Round it up to the nearest you figure and I won’t call you a liar. Scout’s honor!”

Peter  had won awards for acting, Nate knows, and a slew of other awards when they were kids for  everything a young boy can win awards for and a few extra things on top of them  but he doesn’t think  _shit eating_ was ever a contest Peter entered. 

It should’ve been, though. Peter would have won first place and every other place after it. He would’ve taken home the trophy, the scholarship, the prize money,  the title, and whatever else could be thrown at him . A billboard would have gone up at the limits of the city he was born in:  _Hometown of America’s Best Shit Eater!_ and a cartoon portrait of Peter’s grinning face would be right there  on it  for anyone driving in to see.

N ate closes his eyes and counts to ten and somewhere between  four and  five wonders if Peter was this much of an asshole when he was alive  (yes,  yes he was)  and  then between seven and eight asks himself  why the hell  he was ever Peter’s friend in the first place (proximity, the fear of loneliness, an eleven year old’s inability to resist the object of his hard on no matter how much of a dick they are).

Then he opens his eyes to find Peter still watching him, a curious look on his face – less like he’s a cat and Nate’s a mouse, maybe, and more like he’s a scientist and Nate’s  a  lab rat  he just  zapped with a thousand volts of electricity  just to see h im squirm.  T he tilt of his lips  is still a little amuse d ,  his  eyes still glittering like this is the most fun a dead boy can have  with his soft dick still hanging out of his pants.

N ate watches Peter back and says in the most deadpan voice he can, “Fuck you, Peter.”

“I’m sure you’d like me to, Nate,” Peter says placidly.

“ _Fuck you,_ ” Nate says it again, viciously, nothing deadpan about it.

Peter isn’t intimidated.

Peter laughs again. He leans further back against the bed post, getting comfortable. He shifts his legs a little, brings them closer in until they’re flush along Nate’s legs that are still under the covers. If Peter scoots just a little farther down the bed, the soles of Nate’s sheet-covered feet will be pressed right between Peter’s thighs, right against Peter’s cock that’s still out in the open. A little pull of the sheets up after that and Nate’s bare toes will be touching it, getting slick-wet with Peter’s come painting his toenails like polish, _Jizz Cream_ or _Seed Pearls_ or some other color Sally Hansen will never sell in stores.

Nate refuses to answer his question to himself about whether he wants that or not. He knows the answer, it just feels a little pathetic to acknowledge it now and Nate already feels pathetic enough as it is.

“Y’know what your problem is, Nate? It’s that you don’t know how to get what you want,” Peter says. He looks spent and indolent, more relaxed in this bed than Nate thinks anyone in the history of madhouses has ever been in any bed within their walls without the use of anti-depressants crushed up in their oatmeal and tranquilizers injected in their veins.

Nate shoots him a pointed look.  “ I think I have bigger problems than that, Peter.”

P eter catches the look and the meaning behind it. He rolls his eyes and waves his hand in a dismissive gesture. “No, you don’t. It’s not just  _a_ problem, it’s your  _only_ problem. You don’t know how to negotiate.”

“Negotiate _what_?” Nate asks. 

Peter shoots him a look now. A look that says  _that’s obvious, you dunce_ . 

Nate catches the look but not the meaning.

Peter rolls his eyes again, sighing like he’s a teacher dealing with a student who adds up two and two and gets five every time and  spends the  whole class asking for it to be explained to them  in depth again and again  until the bell  finally rings  and they’re sent on their way, no more enlightened than they were before .

“ _Peter, suck my cock,_ ” Peter mimics in a high, shrill voice that sounds nothing like Nate at all. “That’s why you’re still a virgin, Nate. Sure, you’re cute in a nerd in a mental hospital kinda way, but that line’s not going to work any better than _did it hurt when you fell from heaven_ will.”

Nate refuses to feel anything over his hallucination calling him cute, thanks.

“I’m sorry, are you asking me to—what, Peter? To _romance_ you?”

Peter looks at him haughtily and sniffs.

It’s ridiculous, Nate thinks.

“Well, why shouldn’t you?”

_Absolutely_ ridiculous.

“I know I’ve said this before,” Nate explains slowly. “But I’ll say it again: you’re an hallucination. You’re not real. You’re just--”

And like a dime, Peter’s mood  turns.

“ _I’m sick of this shit, Nate!_ ” Peter shouts venomously. So venomously, so loudly, it has Nate’s mouth snapping shut in surprise and his pulse jumping in his throat. “I’m so _sick_ of you calling me an hallucination and pretending I’m not really here!”

But you are an hallucination, is what Nate thinks. But you’re not here, and Nate almost says it, would say it except that the look in Peter’s eyes has Nate hesitating, has him second guessing saying the thing he’s said often enough and had Peter do nothing more than act sullen over it at most.

Peter has never yelled at him before. Not the real Peter and not the dead Peter, either. Never has Nate heard Peter’s voice raised in anger even when they were ripping monster masks off the faces of the most shameless crooks around and never has he heard it raised in anger that’s directed at _him_.

Nate’s caught off guard, that thing he said would never happen again.  He’s not even sure what he’s going to say but he  feels like he has to say something, anything, can’t just close his eyes and try to sleep and pretend Peter isn’t sitting right there. 

“...Peter\--” he tries and doesn’t get any further than that.

Peter slams a fist down on the mattress hard enough that it makes a sound  as  loud as it would if he’d slammed his fist down on a door,  a bang, a  _hand-on-wood_ slam, a gunshot going off,  a bomb,  a noise that Nate  wouldn’t  even think was possible and that has him shutting up again, voice  stopped as fast as a bird diving head-first into a closed window.

Peter glares at him like he’s something vile, something absolutely loathsome. It’s such an ugly look, a look that’s as out of place on Peter as an angry scream is, and for a second – just a second – Nate doesn’t see a pretty, movie star face, but a face that’s decomposing and full of rot instead. 

He sees Peter’s skin, not  warm  gold  _as gold as honey_ , but  as  pale and waxy  as a bar of wet soap that’s been left out on a shower floor for too long . 

He sees Peter’s  mouth not  a lush pink but the grey-blue-green of a bruise  that’s healing  differently in every place ,  lips  like dead grubs and half-gone  besides like something  started chewing  the flesh away  then got full and scampered off  leaving half the meal behind . 

He sees Peter’s eyes gone from their sockets and maggots crawling around the blackened insides and falling out of the empty holes all over the place. 

He sees the strip of skin and bone separating Peter’s nostrils gone, just one large hole there with a horse fly sitting in it  gazing out, rubbing its front legs together gleefully, like a beast in a cave  plotting its next move . 

He sees Peter’s head bald, skull exposed, black fetid thick liquid that must be blood _but it looks like oil like tar like something Nate has never seen before that living people should never see_ oozing out of cracks in it and getting congealed in whatever wispy bits of matted hair are still left, hair that has none of the lustrous sheen as the living Peter’s hair but has all the dull, faded out dryness of that ratty nest of hair that gets built up in a brush that hasn’t been cleaned out in years but still gets used every day, hair that’s been dragged through a septic tank so full of human shit it might explode from the build up of gases it produces for good measure.

He sees Peter as dead as the real Peter must be in the ground where he’s buried, but _worse_ , and Nate’s positive in the second that it lasts, that long eternal second, that he’s going to puke until his intestines spill out from his mouth and then if that doesn’t kill him, he’s going to want to wrap his intestines around his neck and hang himself with them so he can stop seeing it, so the image can fade away into the dark where all the monsters go and Nate can escape somewhere where it will never grace his sight again.

And  then  Nate blinks and  it’s gone. It’s gone like it was never there to start with.

Peter is back as he was,  looking pouty and put out but  still  handsome, human, and whole.  Completely and utterly alive. As alive as Nate  is ,  as alive as the nurses and other patients he sees every day  are ,  as alive as anyone  can be .

Nate stares at Peter with a heart pounding harder than a race horse, with the taste of his own blood tinged bile, penny-sour, hanging in the back of his throat like a ghost itself and then he notices the soreness in the tongue, tests it, realizes that bloody flavor is from biting it nearly in half. 

Nate hadn’t even noticed he’d bitten it at all. He doesn’t even remember when it happened, at what point,  what specific horror  about that vision of  the  dead Peter  got him so bad that it made him mutilate himself and not even feel it.

If Peter notices anything is off or knows what just happened, he doesn’t show it.

“I just want you to stop saying I’m an hallucination is all,” Peter says sulkily. “It’s not too much to ask for, I don’t think.”

The look on his face would be akin to a kid asking their parents for a favor, for a toy in a store or to go to a friend’s house for a sleepover, if it wasn’t for the cunning sharpness in his eyes that’s so out of place with the sulkiness and the pout, a sharpness too adult for any child and too callous for any adult.

Too calculating.

Too much like the eyes of a monster under a kid’s bed waiting for the moment tiny human feet swing over the side, the moment where it’ll see those thin bare ankles with skin so delicate and soft and tendons so fragile and its monster cock’ll jump between what could never pass as legs and it’ll reach out and grab them and pull them under and _eat ‘_ _em_ _up and gobble ‘em whol_ _e!_

There’s something about that look, something that reminds Nate of being in a place far from here, with that book open in front of him, THE book open in front of him, reading words out of it that shouldn’t have ever been read aloud (he should have never read them aloud, should have known better, nothing would be like this if he’d just – he should have--). 

Something about those eyes makes Nate more afraid than he has been in years, makes him want to piss his pants and run screaming from his bed and _get out get out get OUT_ of there.

And maybe Peter senses that fear – as much as an hallucination can sense fear, if Peter is an hallucination (because suddenly...suddenly Nate isn’t so sure;  he was so sure before, he knows, but ) – because his  eyes lose that monstrous glint, his look softens, and he smiles  gently at Nate , almost apologetically. 

“Aww, Nate, come on. Don’t look so down! You just gotta look at things from my point of view, you know?” Peter says it like it’s a reasonable request, like they’re just any two friends having any conversation, two roommates, like he’s asking Nate to not to eat his food out of the fridge or to stop leaving the toilet seat up. “And hey, maybe---”

Peter  moves suddenly, leaning forward to half-straddle the bottom half of Nate’s legs so he can put his hand  still wet with come  on Nate’s knee.  He  squeezes it gently and Nate can feel the warmth of his palm  seeping through the sheets, through his sleep pants, and then, very purposefully, Peter slides that hand up in a slow caress up to Nate’s thigh, keeping those calculating eyes on Nate’s face the whole time.

“Maybe if you do something for me, I can do something for you. Negotiation, buddy. Like I said, it’s all you need to learn to get what you want.”

Peter’s smile broadens into a  salacious grin  that  he’s never given Nate before but  must’ve  used to get plenty of women to come home with him when he was alive , his thumb rubbing circles into Nate’s thigh so close to his cock it would take nothing for it to reach over and touch it, but Nate isn’t hard anymore. He’s nowhere close to it.  He doesn’t welcome the touch like he would have minutes ago when he said  _suck my cock_ like a prayer and hoped it would come true. 

N ow Nate would give anything to have Peter  _stop_ touching him, to get away from him, to disappear and never grace Nate’s thoughts or his vision ever again. 

Now Nate  looks into Peter’s eyes and  all he can think about  are  the  maggots crawling around behind them.

  



End file.
